


Magenta

by yugoslavia



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: F/M, Original Character(s), Original Pokemon Region
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-12 02:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13537383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yugoslavia/pseuds/yugoslavia
Summary: Juliet's adventure is cut short by a deadly encounter with a powerful new enemy and a fateful meeting with a mysterious, legendary Pokemon.  Now tasked with saving her younger sister from the clutches of the sinister Team Rocket, Juliet and her newfound friends must venture through the wild and largely untamed Pol region in pursuit of the legendary Pokemon that began her journey, and the clock is ticking.





	Magenta

A dark hall loomed beyond the entrance of the Welcome Center. The glass doors that had sealed the front of the building for years had been smashed in, their glass scattered across the floor of the circular room. The only source of light coming in from beyond the bright outdoor lights on large streetlamp-like posts. They cast glowing, ethereal light on the smooth, circular walls of the entryway and reception area, but the reach of the light disappeared into the dark hallway.

Within the hallway, the discarded materials of construction—old tarps, painting tools, power tools and discarded beer cans from another era—had been pushed aside to the very edges. A new set of footprints had been set in the dust, leading to the end of the hallway where it split into two hallways and led to the wide, open entrance of the central exhibit of the Welcome Center.

It was a wide, circular room, mimicking the reception area outside and the hallways that circled around the perimeter from other exhibits. The smooth white floor was littered with simple display cases, many without anything in them or their exhibits incomplete. The surrounding walls were just as bare, with even less hung on their surface, light sconces and other fixtures hanging incomplete off the surface. A large circular skylight filled the middle of the ceiling, with the white, translucent and frosted glass darkened by the shadows of tree branches and piles of dead leaves sitting on top—remnants of overgrowth outside the structure that had fallen through collapsed glass panels in the dome above.

A large model of a map resided with in a gigantic, square case that had once been in the center of the floor. It was a map of the region, made with excruciating detail for the time, but many of the model trees within had been knocked over—some houses or sections of buildings falling over when the whole display case had been shoved aside. Only a smooth white imprint of what the floor looked like when it had been first constructed remained in the center of the floor, and a track of dust that had remained when the case was dragged out of the way made any mark that the map model had once been there.

In the corner, in a passageway for maintenance and employees, the display of a terminal mounted on the wall woke up from a decades-long sleep cycle. A few lines of thin red text appeared as it began its startup sequence, then moved to its next operation.

As if entered by a ghost, a few lines of text were quickly typed into the waiting command line.

A low, dull hum filled the building, rising from the beneath the ground and filling the facility. Lights switched on at their dimmest point in the outside of the rooms, flickering from years of disuse, taking their time to grow to their full intensity. Overhead, the lights that had been embedded in a gap between the circular margins of the ceiling and the surrounding walls switched on with loud electrical pops, the hum of old electronics warbling out of the panels in the ceiling above as the lights went in and out of intensity.

Various snippets of audio clips played in the background. At first it was the start of a soundtrack, the sound of some theme music playing distantly in the background before it disappeared. Various voices clipped through, starting and stopping short of being anything clearer than the voice of a man and the voice of a woman, echoing throughout the building and building to a cacophony.

Then, a voice cut through like an intercom. It was a recording, old from the quality of recording and the way the woman spoke.

" _This is a test of the emergency systems of the Pol Region Welcome Center. Maintenance crew members, please head to your designated places inside the center to perform inspection."_

Throughout the building, from various sources in various rooms, tests for rooms as the 'Undersea Exploration Preview Center', and the 'Agricultural Development Showroom' could be heard in the background, listing off the various parts of the exhibit that were to be tested and what part the tests were running on. In the central exhibit hall, the voice over the speakers corresponded with spotlights that shone down on various displays—whether complete or incomplete—and described what to inspect.

The recording was fast-forwarded, corresponding with a quick remote entry on the terminal in the corner, cutting through sections of audio and pausing certain tests, until finally the last, hidden test was played.

_"Inspect deep storage object beneath panel 17A. Storage will open correspondingly. Beginning extraction."_

The dull hum of a hydraulic motor beneath the ground seemed much closer now, within inches of the center of the floor. For a second there was a bulge in the center of the ground where map model display case had once resided, only seconds before the floor split open as a large metal object slowly pushed itself up and out of the ground. A large chunk of the old floor rested atop the steel cage that rose out of the ground, falling off of the top edge of it and sending a clouds of dust and crumbs cascading over the edges, the chunks of plaster crumbling down like finely ground sand on the structural pylons that held the inside of the cage together.

The center of the cage was a large glass tube, nearly as wide as a person, clouded with dust on the old surface. The metal bars that braced the externals of the cage from collapsing down on it crossed around the cage, securing the glass tube chamber on the inside. As the steel platform that it stood on reached the upper edge of the crater it had created, the fitted metal rings stacked around the glass tube telescoped away from the center, up into rings near the top or bottom and exposing the bare glass of the tube. The metal pylons that linked around the rings sank down into the steel plate until only the main support posts at the four corners of the cage platform and lid remained. As the last components slid back the humming sound of hydraulics beneath the ground came to quiet halt. Something was inside the tube—something that looked like a large rocky mass from the outside.

At either of the four entrances of the central exhibit hall, the first shadows of figures entering through appeared, seconds before nearly a dozen flashlights switched on and pointed in towards the new object in the center of the room. They walked slowly, pacing their steps carefully, as the sounds inside the exhibit hall became quiet enough in the chaotic echoes of the other halls to hear their footsteps.

All of the flashlights came within range of the glass chamber, lighting the layers of dust and debris that lined the outside and what residue was beneath. The slightly shifting, wobbling flashlights focused their beams on the outside making it glow bright against the darkness and even brighter as they got close.

"Stop."

Near the front entrance that led to the Welcome Center entrance, a man had stopped far back from the advancing line of mysterious figures. It was his voice, and as his leadership demanded everyone stopped in the room.

Directly ahead of him was a different person, a girl. She had come the closest of anyone in the loosely organized circle of flashlights and people approaching the metal platform and the glass tube. Even as the rest were looking back towards him, waiting for the next step and his next instruction, she was totally engrossed in the object ahead.

"Wowow...!" the girl laughed, clapping her hands together. "There really was something in this dusty old crypt… Guess that map of yours was worth something after all…"

"We're not out of this yet, Kat."

Kat, the girl ahead, turned back. She pursed her lips, brushing the chocolate-colored bangs away from her eyes with a huff, a dark beret on her head and a wiry headband of cat ears on top of that. She was standing in the way of the flashlight beam he had pointed at the glass chamber behind her, a sliver of her body caught in the spotlight. On the dark, rain-soaked black surface of her officer's jacket, a bright red 'R' was emblazoned in the middle. As she looked back she faked a pout, but couldn't hold it for long when it was all there was between her and a wicked smile.

"You're no fun…" said Kat, the whine palpable in her voice. She couldn't resist the chance to giggle again, but it instantly made her wince.

The young man in the back, near the entrance—the one who had spoken up in the first place, the one who wasn't taking kindly to Kat's jokes, the one with the poky pink hair beneath his Team Rocket hat, the beady blue eyes and the starved-skinny body—stared silently back at Kat. Nothing about her taunts and teases was making him smile or even seek to humor her. Nothing about this seemed funny, but it wasn't because he was focused on the task. He was focused on Kat and Kat alone, and Kat knew.

Kat had a self-realizing smile plastered across her face as soon as she figured out why. "Oh, Clyde..."

This was enough to make Clyde's skin crawl, feeling a hundred eyes in the dark as every one of the Team Rocket grunts that surrounded the metal platform and the glass tube watched him. He didn't look back, instead watching as Kat walked to him, practically strutting across the abandoned, dusty floors of the exhibit hall.

"You really do care about wittle ol' me..." Kat purred.

It would have embarrassed Clyde on any other occasion, but he was too engrossed in his thoughts to let it change his mind—even as Kat came close to him.

"Is that girl still bothering you...?" asked Kat, her eyes wandering up Clyde's chin to his eyes. "It was only a scratch, really. I think I did a lot worse to her..."

Instead of letting Kat come any closer, Clyde put his hands on her her arms, holding her at half an arm's length away. He had been staring at the walls thoughtfully as Kat had practically walked into him, and now that he had her attention more seriously he was looking down at her, staring back at her.

"We have a loose end that we need to take care of... together."

* * *

_"…_ _a land brimming with life. Adventure, meaning—and all sorts of exciting Pokemon, too! A place where the hopes and dreams from the youngest to the oldest, t_ _he big and the small, the mighty and the_ _humble…"_

An array of large CRT monitors glowed down from their perches above the information booth in the reception area. They were the only source of light in the entryway of the Welcome Center beyond the glowing lights of the freshly-powered exhibits ahead, the flickering displays playing a video as old as the building on loop—as it would likely have if the place had ever opened.

On the screen, an older man removed his dark cowboy hat, revealing a thick head of bushy, white hair that had been out of style for decades by the present day, setting the hat on something just outside of the camera's view. As the camera panned in, the ghostly image of the monitor giving glowing detail to his aged face, showing more details beyond the muddied black that his frontier-themed suit had been given in the grainy images, an overlay of white text appeared beneath and showed his name, Fabian. Behind him was a matte, positioned just over his shoulder, a swell of music coming through the abandoned speakers above the monitors as the images filled the screen.

_"_ _This, my friends, is the golden dream we could all have of the Northwestern Reaches someday—a day that may come much sooner than you think._ _And all because of another significant day that didn't happen too long ago, a day_ _when the people of this vast land made a significant decision that would forever makes its course in history_ _a better and brighter one_ _."_

A lone hand appeared over the screen. It was Fabian's hand, a close shot of it pointing above a spot marked on the matte of a dome-shaped building on a plateau. A large statue of two men shaking hands faced the bay just in front of it.

_"What day is that, you ask? The day Pol territories decided to finally to be annexed by the Pokemon League, adding a third member to the Kanto-Johto Conference,_ _and making Pol a fantastic new chapter in the adventures to be had there."_

The camera had cut to a new shot, zoomed out, looking at where Fabian stood in front of the large matte, tracking with him as he walked along the set towards a table where a large model stood—the same model that once rested in the center of the main exhibit hall. Among the tiny trees, a clearing with paths and strange, futuristic large buildings that all gathered around and linked to a much larger structure in the center: a dome, lifted above all that was this unusual park, the centerpiece of this proposed land. A slice of the matte was visible just over Fabian's shoulder, showing similar landscapes at the center of the wide region—likely the spot where this area resided.

_"_ _The world is getting an experience like none other—a great Pokemon League course, yes, but a people and spirit as wild as the frontiers in legends gone before._ _More than anything, it serves as a monument—a testament—of the achievements of man, and the hopeful futures it could hold. We spend everyday working on bringing these_ _experience_ _s to life_ _for you and your family to enjoy in Pol._

_"Now this all seems, well, a little too good to be true. Can we ever really finish this all? A lot of times the question gets asked, something along the lines of if we're 'in over our heads' or something to that effect. The answer is, to the surprise of most people, no, we don't think we can finish it all. We don't think we ever could! And that's because we're embarking on the kind of project that requires more than just our collective imagination. You see, Pol isn't some someday region, it's a story_ __—and like any good story, it's waiting for it's hero. Every single one of you could be a hero for an entire region that so desperately needs one to continue on, all in your own special way.  
_ _

_"_ _And now, as testament to the new and innovative spirit we're bringing with the Pol region,_ _I'd like to_ _introduce to you the head of_ _our new_ _Pokemon research facilities,_ _Professor Amadeus Evergreen."_

A new figure appeared on-screen in a new scene . A young man, possibly in his mid-to-late twenties, appears in the center against a teal-blue background. He had been distracted, looking down at his arms where he cradles a young Furret in-between where he has his arms crossed together. When he looks up to the camera the studio lights catch the glare of his wide-framed eye glasses, his skin looking unusually pasty through the scraggly lengths of his beard. His hair is long and brushed into a feathered, strangely organized mess. An unusual steel-blue device had been attached over his shoulders—some kind of unknown sensor.

_"_ _We've spent only six months in our new laboratory in Cedar Ridge,_ _and already we've been working on introducing some amazing technologies that haven't been seen yet in any of our other sister regions._ _My focus and study is on the past, present, and most importantly the future of Pokemon._ _The world of Pokemon is a strange, and yet wonderful, magical place—_ _that magic keeps us here, it keeps us exploring, be_ _cause it seems endless..."_

The view on the screen went on to show a table nearby, where some of the professor's assistants worked on a table showing technologies they had developed.

In the center of the floor, beneath the radiant and otherworldly glow of the monitors above the welcome desk, a young girl stirred. She shivered, feeling the intense draft of the open front doors that reached her and sent chills through her from the forest air of Pol outside. It made her shift, trying to turn, until she was met with the searing sensation of soreness—a pain that she didn't remember the last time she had woken up, just as she didn't remember going unconscious.

Juliet opened her eyes, meeting with the old ceiling of the Welcome Center entrance. As she turned towards the brightest lights, away from the welcome desk, she looked to the front where the lights above the paths leading to the building glowed brightly, looking through the open doors—or, rather, door-frames, with all of the glass knocked out of them and scattered across the floor. She made extra sure, as she turned herself over and put a hand down on the smooth linoleum floors, that she didn't touch near any of the glass beneath.

Though she first appeared as nothing more than the dark outline of a person, a light shone down overhead like a spotlight and instantly brought everything into view. Where she had brought herself onto her knees, knelt over and barely supporting her upper body on her arms, she was awash in shadow and the darkness of the room. The tangled mess of brunette hair that hung over her head in sharp, zig-zagging curls was damp, and where it rested over her back in the tight ponytail she kept it in had soaked the backside surface of her white top.

A pair of voices were above her—real, human voices. She could hear them before she heard the thud of footsteps through the floor beneath her.

It was a man and a woman, and strangely they sounded familiar to Juliet. She couldn't remember exactly where she had heard their voices before, or why exactly they were coming towards her, but it all gave her a bad feeling inside. There was something malicious about these two figures as they approached, and it was pulling Juliet out of her numbed senses and into reality.

"You really have something against this girl, huh?" the woman asked, sounding snide.

The footsteps stopped. They were just short of the circular desk that took up the center of the room, stopping before they could come along the side and find Juliet. She had risen onto her side, having rested herself from where she had pulled herself up. She had rolled over with her exhausted, hurt arm beneath her. Her free arm kept her propped on her side and pushed off of the floor, keeping her up as she craned her head up to look around the side of the desk towards the source of the voices. She kept herself as quiet as possible, trying not to disturb the mess of shattered glass beneath her, only lifting her head or making any movement at all to see where these people—presumably her attackers—were standing.

Something came into her line of sight. A Pokeball, down on the ground just ahead of her. She recognized it, knowing exactly whose it was—she recognized the black strip of electrical tape along the side, holding together the cracked hemispheres of the red shell on top.

"Honestly, as much as I would love to toy with this brat for all she's done, I really don't see the point. It just seems like overkill now."

"You know what she's done."

All was suddenly quiet—aside from the looping audio recording just above Juliet, and the sounds of other halls throughout the building that were still looping out of order. Just above Juliet she could hear it, the sound of a charged silence carried between the two people above her. Her head rose silently—still unable to see them beyond the shadows they cast on the walls just behind them, as she stared up at the slicked, raggedy curls that fell past her brow. Down in front of her, the Pokeball was just inches outside her grasp, begging her to tempt fate. She hoisted herself up another inch, moving herself closer.

To Kat, this was strange. It was the first time Clyde had really talked all night, and it wasn't at all what she had expected. He was upset, but it wasn't what she was used to. It was like she was looking at a stranger, searching him for some kind of sign of what he was doing.

"That's what I just said..."

Clyde turned to look over at her. "This is about order. This is about stopping... incidents."

"Being tough to cover how soft you are doesn't work with me. Maybe it works on the Empress, but not with me."

"She hurt you Kat. I don't want to see you in any more danger."

Kat advanced on Clyde. He realized only seconds after that she wasn't really taking a step towards him—even though she was. She instead was stomping down on something beneath him, a hand.

" _Aaahh!_ " Juliet shouted, much louder than her voice wanted to. The cold sole of a boot was on top of her hand, and it had smashed against the ground at an awkward angle, the boot trying to crush it like a pest in just stepping on it.

"Then you certainly made a bad career move for the both of us," said Kat, coldly, almost casually walking towards him. She never looked at Juliet or the hand beneath her boot, instead looking up at Clyde and making sure he was listening. "You don't have to watch after me now that we're in—that's why we joined in the friggin' first place, if you can remember."

Clyde was contemplating, looking down at the ground, watching as Juliet writhed. She had reached her arm out to the side to try and wedge herself free, instead putting it on the broken glass of the open Welcome Center doors. Her Pokeball was just past where Kat had planted her other foot on the ground, out of reach, effectively ending the possibility of Juliet getting her hands on her Pokeball. When she looked up to Kat, he saw her impatience, but he didn't let it affect him, instead looking like he had made his mind up.

"I'm not going to stop," said Clyde. "I can't."

Kat released where her boot was holding Juliet's hand to the ground. She reached behind herself and into her utility belt and pulled a weapon that had been tucked inside. The grip made it look like a pistol of some kind, but the nose of it was blunt and covered with a curved plastic panel.

Juliet gasped, feeling the pain suddenly release from her hand. It was numb, pain lingering in where the bones of her hand had been forced together in a weird, folded shape. She gently flexed it, hardly able to use it to grasp at the air, let alone to put weight on it she would need to pull herself up off the ground and escape. She gave into the pain and exhaustion of being put through such torment as she slouched down onto her side and pulled the weight that had been on her hand off of it. Her free hand grasped at her wrist, letting her fingers flex as carefully as she could.

Panting, Juliet looked up at the two Team Rocket members who stood above her. Only Clyde was looking back at her, watching her every tormented move. Standing just beside him, Kat was inspecting the weapon in her hand, switching on a small knob on the top of the device and suddenly charging it with energy. It was some kind of energy weapon, the plastic tip suddenly glowing with a bright red light that fizzled and flickered beneath, held out at the end of the pistol grip in her hand.

Juliet swallowed, terrified. There was a coldness spreading through her chest as she realized what was to happen next.

"P-Please…" she pleaded, quietly. "I need to know…"

"About your ugly sister?" Kat asked, the hint of a smile on her lips as she adjusted a small knob on the side of the weapon, making the tip glow brighter and crackle with light.

Clyde had only looked up from where Juliet was staring up at Kat and the weapon when she heard Kat snicker, the red glow of the charged tip casting deep shadows across his face as he looked over at her.

Juliet was tearing up. "W-Where's Daisy…?" she asked, all the weakness in her body in her voice.

A bright flash of energy erupted from the end of the weapon, feet from Juliet's head. Kat had tested the weapon, pointing down at the Pokeball Juliet had tried reaching for minutes ago. It was a powerful laser bolt that shot straight down into the Pokeball, creating an incredible surge of heat that radiated through the air for a split-second before the Pokeball absorbed it all. Through the plastic surface an intense light burst through the inside of it, pooling and flashing through the inside, the outside crackling with electricity as it fried the insides of it.

Just then, a shadow dropped over the Pokeball. It was quick, and in the single action a boot-clad foot dropped down on top of it and stomped through. The snapping sound of fiberglass and the crushing sound of electronic components getting ground together by force were all Juliet knew of the Pokeball beneath where Kat had stepped, until they stepped back. A heap of electronics remained, cradled in the smashed nest of a white Pokeball half.

Juliet stared with gasping eyes. She felt the urge to shiver but her body was too frozen to do anything about it.

"Safe," Kat finally answered, watching Juliet's devastation at the smoking Pokeball, bemused.

She used the chance of Juliet's distraction to promptly flip her, swinging her leg into Juliet's shoulder and clipping it hard with the inside of her boot, making her flip over onto her back and land on the broken glass, sent scuttling for a split-second. Sprawled, and lying on her back, Juliet had been defeated, hardly moving in any attempt to get back on her feet.

Kat flipped the weapon, grasping the gun by the barrel, holding the handle of the weapon out to Clyde as she took a step closer to him, offering it to him. She traced his line of sight to where he was staring at Juliet on the ground, watching her before looking up at him.

"Don't be such a baby," Kat hissed between her teeth.

Clyde stared at it for a moment—staring at the Pokemon Ranger insignia that had been pressed into the grip. His hesitation lasted only a second, as he took it by the grip.

Juliet was choking on the ground, sputtering. Her hand had gone to grasp at the bruise that was forming beneath her shoulder but had given-up halfway, instead laying by her side with her other arm sprawled across the ground. Her head laid against the ground in a daze, feeling a shadow draw across her body as a figure came to stand over her—Clyde, watching her with the weapon in his hand.

He took aim, staring down at Juliet's eyes where the gun was pointed between.

"No hard feelings," he said, quietly.

Clyde squeezed the trigger, and fired.

* * *

_The world of Pokemon… a vast place of wonder and adventure, seemingly without rules._

_Years after the mysterious death of its original procurer Fabian, the long-abandoned Pol territories that had sat in a state of disrepair for decades seemed finally ready for its own Pokemon League. The Greater Pokemon League of the surrounding regions decided to make its move and send in groups of its Pokemon Rangers into the territory to make preparations for Pol to become a region twenty years behind schedule._

_There in the wilds of the Pol territories, the Rangers found frontier living against the harsh and often dangerous conditions of the land. Small settlements and some large enough to easily become cities, all with people who had been living there for years with minimal governance from the Greater Pokemon League and in the remnants of what had been constructed before. The Rangers allied with as many settlements as they could, becoming the basis for what the new region would ultimately become._

_But the Rangers also encountered a much more dangerous threat. Several settlements had become allies of or been overtaken by outlaws and other criminals who had sought refuge in the region, and lawlessness had grown to prominence without the presence of law._

_In the three years since Team Rocket had disbanded for a second time, the remaining members had fled to the nearly impassible mountains north of Johto, eventually finding the untapped potential of the Pol territories that lie just above. There in their own settlements and in other lawless towns they were able to regain strength and recruit more members for their newly-realized criminal empire. Under the supervision of their mysterious new leader, the grip of Team Rocket in the territories had grown without resistance and have gained the means of keeping Pol a haven of crime and independent of the Greater Pokemon League._

_The Rangers sent to patrol and begin managing the settlements of the Pol territories suddenly have their hands full, and suddenly Team Rocket have its first true threat . In all of this the settlements of Pol are caught in the middle, their fates up for determination._

_Juliet has just been caught in the middle of this conflict—and now seemingly fallen victim to it. A young girl with no aspirations to get caught in some greater dispute of control and power has tonight had it made personal. The life of her young sister is now on the line, and now it is on her to rescue her from the clutches of the evil Team Rocket—if she can even survive her first encounter._


End file.
